Once a year - typically in early to mid May, though sometimes into June. It's always held in San Fran at the Moscone Center. Cost is about US $2000 to attend for even just the basic conference, tutorials etc. However, Sun manage to fix the center to capacity (approx 22,000) every year, so they're obviously got no problems charging that amount.

Actually, it's usually in June, but was in May last year. Next year it's Monday 27th June till Thursday 30th June. If you can find the money, then JavaOne is a great experience - I've been to the last five, and hopefully will continue going in the future.

If you present a technical session or 'BOF' (basically a smaller, potentially more interactive, evening technical session), you get free entrance to the conference. (Also, you should find it easier to persuade your boss to pay for the remaining cost: travel & accommodation). The 'Call for Papers' for JavaOne 2005 will come out some time in the autumn. They get far more proposals than they can use and reject a large proportion, so this approach isn't a sure thing even for the 'big names'.

I went for the 1st time this year and I have similar reactions to Herkules. The majority of the talks were pretty basic (even though the majority were labelled "advanced"), though there were a couple that highlighted some tech I wasn't aware of at the time. The pavilion floor was tame in my opinion. 99% enterprise junk (duh..). The GTG booth was cool, but still in its infancy; it looked pretty though. The Javagaming townhall meeting was neat, but I really think they should have recorded it and posted it on this site as I didn't recognize anyone else from here. The meeting was neat in so far that the majority of the staff was present and gave their back stories/history. It was on the very emotional side, but hey the future does look good despite the hype.

Regardless of the lack of technical content in the presentations or the pavilion floor the real bonus is the people that you meet at the conference or in the pubs afterwards.

I was lucky to get a BOF accepted. That and to boot an editor from O'Reilly was in my audience and I really nailed my presentation with a decent game demo with surround audio. I've been chatting it up with those folks. They invited me to this years Foo Camp (link about last year: http://xrl.us/b9sv) where I will be presenting my tech to the max.

Next year I am going for a full technical session and will rock it if accepted, but hey no one wants to see a real time audio / real time graphics oriented Java based game presented with key algorithms dissected right? ;P

So yes.. Overall J1 was very positive as I made contact with some influential folks, etc. I certainly encourage everyone here to submit proposals for BOFs, etc.

Do you have to have a presentation, or can you just whatch the conferences and lectures? I'm not old enouth anyway, only 15 so they probably only let adults in there and no exceptions, huh? oh well... Probably will learn more from bruce eckels books

So yes.. Overall J1 was very positive as I made contact with some influential folks, etc.

Hm, I *had* a full session (on FlyingGuns) during the games summit in 2003 and I went there for I *hoped* to make some contacts. Again, the result has been totally disappointing. The ONLY contact I had was with someone from M$

No feedback at all, no inquiries, offers, jobs, technical questions, .....We've seen Chris&friends to say 'hi'. That has been all.

The reason might be that my talk wasn't quite cool enough. Or that being a foreigner kept me away from the important places. Somehow, the games summit itself has been a well-kept secret.

J1, like most conferences works on the principle of needing to Know People to make further contacts. You go there to catch up with people you know, who then introduce you to people they know and think might be interesting for you to meet. Doing talks help a bit for random chance of getting contacts, but not always guaranteed to do that.

J1, like most conferences works on the principle of needing to Know People to make further contacts. You go there to catch up with people you know, who then introduce you to people they know and think might be interesting for you to meet. Doing talks help a bit for random chance of getting contacts, but not always guaranteed to do that.

Yep.. I lucked out _a lot_ especially because the O'Reilly editor skipped the talk he was supposed to attend and made it by mine.. I probably only had 20 people at my BOF too, but then again out of the majority of demos at all of J1 mine probably would be ranked high for what I pulled off. All of the audio tech I'm involved with is not even on the horizon with Sun, GTG, etc.

As far as the O'Reilly connection it probably helps that I plan to release the game engine open source when it is ready for 1.0 in a couple of months.

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Yeah, true, but I hoped that the gaming people there (Chris, Doug, Athomas, Jeff, Ken, Shawn....) would be helpful opening some doors.

Yeah.. I spent a lot of time hanging around the GTG booth and got to talk with pretty much everyone above for a bit. It was useful insofar that I know more on each persons respective personalities and involvement, but they are fighting for attention presently let alone helping other independent developers get attention outside of sanctioned contests or links on this site as far as I can tell.

Honestly, I was a little bummed to see that Tom Bryntesen's Squareheads project was "misrepresented" by the GTG. Everyone (all GTG members) were mentioning it as developed by Squareheads and the game was a Q3/FPS clone. This occurred at the booth and in the presentations by all of the GTG members.. Basically they were pimping the work without knowing or finding out who to credit which shouldn't have taken that long.

There was brief talk at the town hall meeting on how to get more funding for indie Java game developers.. But nothing really was put forward.. It really comes down to getting better quality games together.. Since established gaming companies are not switching over quickly this really comes down to improving the knowledge (somehow) of todays Java games indie developer. No answers there.. I made the comment that instead of 3 larger prizes for a game competition that there should be prizes for the top 20 games extending down to books, new graphics cards, for those past the top 5 to 10, etc. I think making an attempt to increase the knowledge and capability of the larger community rather than awarding the top 2 goes much further. Though dang I want to see a rocking game next year Cas.. ;P

Anyway, it seems the GTG is overloaded, undermanned, and underfunded for their own projects though there were "codenames" dropped on some "large" stuff that should be known "sometime" in the future..

Which is far as I'm concerned doesn't help any of us on the outside... As has been mentioned before in these forums some sort of NDA agreement would be nice to arrange between the GTG and the serious indie folks on the outside.

In re of Thinking:Yeah.. You can attend the conference as an audience member, but unless a company picks up the tab then its cost prohibitive. There probably isn't any limit on age outside of travel / hotel arrangements. I luck out as I live in the area.. There is no rush though.. I'm 26 and this is the 1st year I've gone to conferences and I'm speaking at all of them to get in, so I'd just keep to the Eckel books (I started with the C++ one way back.. ;P) and keep on improving your skills, etc. Sending in a BOF proposal is not hard and should be totally encouraged.. I'm all for a younger generation stirring up the pot with new ideas/tech.

Honestly, I was a little bummed to see that Tom Bryntesen's Squareheads project was "misrepresented" by the GTG.

!

And I thought that was just a momentary slip during the presentation (such things happen), not an ongoing screw up. Ouch.

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I made the comment that instead of 3 larger prizes for a game competition that there should be prizes for the top 20 games extending down to books, new graphics cards, for those past the top 5 to 10, etc. I think making an attempt to increase the knowledge and capability of the larger community rather than awarding the top 2 goes much further. Though dang I want to see a rocking game next year Cas.. ;P

c.f. my reply just now in the contest category on this forum, but email me a list of any and all ideas thoughts comments criticisms you had, since we're hoping to arrange some kind of competition via JGF in the not too distant future (probably lagging a month behind the launch of JGF version 3, so perhaps not until winter).

re of Catharsis: I can't wait to finish this bruce eckel book, than I can start coding using all the powerful features, there will be even more in jdk 1.5.0. Any idea of when jdk 1.5.0 will be released?

What's a BOF? is it like a discription of an application or something? if it is, do you need something to display your application? how old do you have to be to speak?

I'll say yes, because it works fine for me - although Blahblahblahh will probably recount horrible problems he had with it.

One word of warning - you can only have one public JRE installed at a time. That's the one that lives in windows/system32 and gets used when you type "java" on the command line or double-click a jar. As you'll probably want to keep this as 1.4, make sure that 1.5 isn't allowed to install a public JRE - at some point it will ask, and it will likely default to yes, so read carefully.

I'm doing a lot of programming for 1.4, if I put 1.5 on my computer will both versions work?

(why empty post? Because mozilla in a moment of madness interpreted "ctrl-z" as "tab to the Post button and hit enter")

Anyway, the problem is that the beta builds of JVM's are very buggy, and *not* guaranteed to be safe - i.e. not to screw up your system. Fair enough - you shouldn't be using any beta from a real company like Sun (who means "beta" when they say beta - i.e. it's a bit dangerous/risky) on a real computer (i.e. "production" system) but only on a spare computer you don't mind screwing up.

With 1.5, the biggest problem I've noticed so far is that the second or third beta introduced a new "feature" where it automatically installed itself as the system JVM (note: you do NOT get a choice in this; it does it anyway, with no dialog / option. Is this a bug? Or a feature?) for various webstart activities. Seeing as 1.5 betas have not-fully-working webstart, this means your webstart is now potentially broken until Sun release a *real* version of 1.5 which you can use to overwrite the crappy beta.

This all makes sense, in a way - they're attempting to "migrate" your webstart install from 1.4 to 1.5. However, a beta product should not be doing this automatically with no option to not do it, nor to undo it. Hence it's probably a bug.

Also, it deletes the entirety of your existing webstart data (cache etc) if you had a 1.4 jvm installed - so you can't even simply carry on using 1.4. You can re-install 1.4, but you only *half* get webstart back - half the time, the 1.5 beta has still managed to steal it. Seems that migration has still got a fair few bugs in it.

Anyway. The point is that you should NEVER be running a beta on your own PC (home or work) you should only be running it on a spare system (if you have no old PC's and can't afford $500 for one, then make a separate partition for all the untrusted software - e.g. stuff that might have viruses or trojans, beta's, etc - so you can try it out and not damage your main system). There really is NO point running a beta JVM as your main one - you will be compiling stuff that other people can't run (yet) since very few people run the betas, and you expose yourself to extra bugs.

At the same time, it's very useful that you have the option of running betas (...on a spare system), since it lets you experiment with new features and bugfixes well in advance of the release date. This enables you to bring out Cool Stuff (tm) within days of the next major release, rather than within months.

Also, in a few rare cases, you may be FORCED to use the beta until Sun fixes a fatal bug in the current real JVM. This happened to us once when a compiler bug in 1.4.2_02 (or 03?) meant we couldn't compile our source any more! It was fixed for the 1.5 beta and for 1.4.2_04 (or maybe it was 05?), but 1.4.2_04 wasn't released until much later (months later), and so we had to switch to 1.5 to compile that particular set of classes.

re of Catharsis: I can't wait to finish this bruce eckel book, than I can start coding using all the powerful features, there will be even more in jdk 1.5.0. Any idea of when jdk 1.5.0 will be released?

On the whole, 1.5 doesn't have many powerful features - to most people it's mainly performance improvements (doesn't affect the developer!), bugfixes and cosmetic improvements. There is really no need to start with 1.5, 1.4 is plenty good enough to get to grips with.

Also, it's worth noting that there are many places which only recently started to use 1.4 seriously, despite the fact that it went gold in 2002 (or was it 2001? !). Sad, but ... there are even companies who are still using 1.3 for all development! You will need to be able to program 1.4.x code (i.e. not using the new 1.5 features) for a good long time to come, so it's not like it's useless knowledge .

If 1.4 is anything to go by, many of the new non-cosmetic features in 1.5 will need 6 months to become stable enough to actually use in non-trivial ways (OK, with 1.4, it took more like 18 months for NIO to become stable, but I'm hoping they find it a lot easier this time!).

Expect to see lots of games not work properly in the first 3 months while people discover what new serious bugs 1.5 has. Bug fixing is an ongoing process, not a milestone (i.e. no matter how sun does it, they'd always have more bugs left to fix at gold)

I didn't say it had no new features, nor no powerful ones; but compare 1.5 to 1.4, and see how the latter introduced a lot more new functionality, especially in the "major" category (logging, NIO, XML, regex, ... )

You could even argue (especially for games developers) that NIO on it's own was as big as all the new stuff from 1.5 put together, since it finally unlocked the door between java and native memory - hence making it far easier to talk to hardware, and at a higher level e.g. opening up OpenGL to almost 1:1 performance with C++.

If you look back historically, Sun have tended to put the really big stuff in ever other major release: 1.2, 1.4, 1.6 (some of the features I've most been waiting for are currently scheduled for 1.6 - e.g. IIRC fullscreen, proper shared memory, etc). 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 each introduced important new features, but much less so than their even counterparts. At least, IMHO.

Although there doesn't seem to be too many extra features in 1.5, things like generics have caught my attention. But the biggest snag I worry about would be missing out of the vast number of people with 'only' 1.4 installed.

Before choosing which version to code to wasn't really a choice, what with LWJGL, Jogl etc. all needing the NIO from 1.4. It can still be tricky enough to get people to upgrade their JVM, so I'll probably be sticking to 1.4 (and thats without even thinking about bugs that might be lurking).

What are other people going to be using? It seems strage to actually have a choice in version for once.

At the same time, it's very useful that you have the option of running betas (...on a spare system), since it lets you experiment with new features and bugfixes well in advance of the release date. This enables you to bring out Cool Stuff (tm) within days of the next major release, rather than within months.

I'm learning java, so I haven't made a serious app yet. I'm looking at how code executes, and learning different apis. I think for java begginers theres not much reason for experimenting with difficult or dangerous betas, I'll save that stuff for later. For now, I'm going to read a lot more about java, and hopefully, sometime I'll make something good.

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